Silence and the Unspeakable across Cultures

visual culture

The new frame created by the act of suicide, I suggest, resembles what Aleksandr Rodchenko, in a 1930 lecture, called “foto-kadry”: an image that deliberately fragments, reduces, and reorients a scene, rather than trying to capture it “in its entirety.” Just as Rodchenko’s photographer employs fragmentation to achieve a sharper, contestatory perception of content, to disrupt the dismal and catastrophic continuity of everyday life, so the suicidal cut creates an oblique point of view directed toward an understanding that resides beyond the social maxim, and perhaps beyond narrative itself. The fragment becomes an index, which turns the spectator into an active participant in the production of meaning.

’The gap thus opened up invites us to bridge it with new, or alternate, texts. Suicide provokes narrative, both a narrative inscribed by the actor as subject, and those stories devised around the suicide as enigmatic object of interpretation. For the gesture of self-destruction makes a person into both subject and object of the action. […] I want to argue that this kind of death does not close the sentence as a signifying totality. Instead, it generates multiple textual readings: legal investigations, explanatory suicide notes, allusions to other suicides.